The great and silent places

It’s one of those comfortable wet nights where you can wear shorts and a loose singlet and be wandering up and down dark, winding stairs to the kitchen for water and not be cold or feel less-bright somehow. The gurgling in the gutter tells me it’s wet out, but there’s no tapping of water on glass. A symphony as droplets meet the new leaves of that old tree and pervasive boredom, is more than enough evidence to support that it’s been raining all day though. Briefly between internet banking and something equally ordinary this afternoon, I’d paused to look out the window. I thought that I’d never seen rain fall so vertically before.

It’s been a busy few weeks, with committee meetings and work, not to mention tying up some loose ends with research. There are moments that stand out:

(1) Sunset in Fitzroy with Catrina, fresh from the plane after her sister’s engagement in Taiwan. The light strikes the curls of a beautiful woman walking past the window of the restaurant and her beautiful boyfriend. We’re at the intersection of Rose Street, where Simon and I had once stood talking to a drunk pirate at noon on a Saturday, having gone to the artist’s market just before. Strange, how I’d been there just a few days before with Nancy and George and their friends after an entire year of not setting foot on Brunswick street. The world looked like it was on fire. Briefly I thought of saffron, and okra.

(2) A postcard from Guatemala, and I’m excited. Jenny writes, I hope this reaches you. Don’t have much faith in the postal system here.

(3) Candy leans over the table of the dodgiest Chinese restaurant on Londsale Street, and says, “We’re so similar. Sometimes I think we do things that we don’t necessarily want to do because we feel forced somehow.”

Friday is the most beautiful day you can imagine. Spring, green, bright, and nearly thirty degrees. I have coffee with a classmate in the park opposite the hospital, and get lifted off into the realm of spare time. I’m supposed to meet Candy again but she’s still in bed when I call early afternoon. I decide to go to the art gallery. I’d been meaning to go since March, when the European masters series was on. Instead I’d passed it on the tram back from the Alfred weekly, watching the end date draw nearer and nearer for the closing of the exhibition until one day it was all gone. I never got off and went in.

A friend once told me that these days, for some reason, the more tired and lonely she gets the more she wants to spend time by herself. The same week, when discussing places we one day wanted to go with Been, I’d found myself saying that I wanted to go to all the great and silent places of the world.

In the quietness of the NGV, I’m struck by a kind of longing.

A photography exhibition is on with photographs of New York and London and Melbourne and Rome on display: Steichen, Atget, Gursky. In a next door space there are large, almost panoramic views of Los Angeles in infinite white space. I’d never wanted to go somewhere more. Down one storey there is an entire display solely dedicated to lace and, having all the time in the world, I read all the placards carefully and now know roughly how to tell the difference between bobbin lace, machine lace, needle lace and chemical lace by looking at something. 

The third floor, houses the contemporary art section and a lot of the chairs that I used to see in the classroom of my Graphics and Design class in high school were there. It’s strange. The many times I’d actually been to the National Gallery of Victoria, I’d never actually been to the third level. Before this I hadn’t even realised it existed.

Somehow I walk into a dark room with only one single object in it. It is a ladder, suspended in nothing, lit up and glowing and changing colour. All the hair on my arm stand on end. It feels like a hand is stroking up my neck. I walk up to it. It seems to emit an infiniteness. When I look down at its base I see it going on forever. I look up, and see it climbs forever. Nobody else was in the room. It is ages before I could move again. Later I find someone’s blog post about the piece: ‘Tender are the Stairs to Heaven is an installation by Yayoi Kusama. I saw this work in January at the NGV in Melbourne. [..] It was during the heat wave and I hadn’t slept for a week. I wanted to cry.’ [link].

Seeing the fixture, I wondered if it was really just the great and silent places in myself that I was longing for.